The Xara Palace

Mdina has held this hilltop since antiquity. It is a dense knot of honey-coloured limestone and baroque doorways, walked through all day by the coaches and their crowds and then left, around dusk, to itself. That is when it earns the name the island gave it, the Silent City, and it is a strange thing to watch happen: the last of the day-trippers file out through the main gate, the lanes go still, and a place that felt like a set becomes a town again.

The Xara Palace is the reason any of that matters to a traveller, because it is the only hotel inside the walls. Its own stone forms part of the bastion that rings the city, and the family that runs it can trace the building back to the seventeenth century, when the Maltese nobility met here to elect their committee of privileges. It opened as a hotel in 1999, a Relais and Châteaux from early on, and it has stayed small and privately held rather than growing into something the walls could not hold.

There are seventeen rooms and suites, each done to its own plan. The house furnishes them the way it was once furnished when people lived here rather than booked in: antiques, oil paintings, heavy Parisian cloth, king beds, the odd gilded headboard. Nothing about it reads as a corporate idea of luxury, and that is the point. The corridors are hung like a private collection, and the courtyard downstairs keeps its cool through the worst of a Maltese afternoon.

Take a room high enough and the view does the rest. From the upper floors it runs clear across the island to the sea, over the rooftops of Rabat next door and out towards the coast. The building has a way of turning inward to shade and stone, then opening, at a window or a terrace, onto all of that light. It is a small hotel that never feels short of somewhere to go.

De Mondion sits on the top floor, and it is the reason the hotel turns up in conversations that have nothing to do with where to stay. It held its Michelin star again in the 2026 guide, the kitchen under Clint Grech working a modern, lightened Mediterranean line with a few French turns. The room indoors is small and formal, carpeted and quiet. The terrace is the draw in summer, tables set out on the bastion with the lights of the island spread beneath you and the warm air coming up off the stone.

Below it the house keeps two easier tables. The Medina works a lower, older register inside a house of stone and timber, and out on the piazza the Trattoria A.D. 1530 takes the simple Italian end of the evening, tables under the streetlamps once the gates have shut. You never have to leave the walls to eat well, which for a city this size is close to remarkable.